Community colleges and minority serving institutions play important roles in the U.S. higher education system. These open and predominantly broad access institutions serve more first-generation, low-income, post-traditional, and racially and ethnically diverse student populations than any other sector. Institutional leaders will increasingly need…

This study examined three institutional researchers from three different Hispanic-serving community colleges in southern California to examine how they would use data to act as agents of organizational learning and raise awareness of Hispanic students' educational outcomes within their respective institutions. This study was of a qualitative…

The origins of institutional effectiveness are traced, its evolution within community colleges is described, the use of the term "institutional effectiveness" is analyzed, and a practical, operational definition of the term is presented. The author hopes that this definition and the discussion in this article prove useful to community college…

How can it be that 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, our institutions of higher education have still not found ways of reducing the higher education gaps for racial and ethnic groups? That is the question that informs and animates the Equity Scorecard model of organizational change. It shifts institutions' focus from what…

This document is intended for leaders and decision makers who work with community colleges at the classroom, college, and system level. Readers will find an overview of the purpose, activities, findings, and recommendations from a three-year project involving 11 California community colleges, undertaken as a partnership between The Carnegie…

Action research can play an important role in institutional research endeavors to improve the quality of organizational performance in higher education. This article outlines how the action research perspective informed a research design that integrated fragmented and isolated student success initiatives at a large urban two-year institution where…

Asera assesses the challenges that community colleges face in educating students in basic skills. For a significant group of college students the seemingly automatic skills of literacy and numeracy have become opaque, creating a particular challenge for community colleges, 98 percent of which offer at least one remedial reading, writing or…

This report presents findings from a study conducted by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) on how well prepared today's community colleges are in moving toward the greater use of data and research to improve student success. Data for the study were drawn from two major sources: first, an e-mail survey of college administrators…

The kinds of students that transferred into or out of 30 postsecondary institutions, including universities, senior colleges, junior colleges, and community colleges, were studied. Several types of institutions were assessed: residential, commuter, traditionally black, and special focus (military, medical, technical, and agricultural). Also…

As part of a statewide followup study of all students who entered a community college in the fall of 1970, a questionnaire was mailed in April 1974 to the 3,615 students who had entered Montgomery Community College in fall 1970. Twenty percent of the questionnaires were nondeliverable; thus, 2,890 students received the questionnaire, and of these,…

This paper describes a Developmental Education Outcomes Study being conducted for 21 Minnesota state community colleges. The goals of the study were to examine the academic performance of students placed into developmental reading, writing, and mathematics courses and to identify areas where improvement was needed. Subjects were all 20,543…

Is college student academic performance harmed by competing employment obligations? At what point do the hours spent on the job begin to interfere with the predicted academic achievement of full-time students? This study addresses these questions by analyzing data collected from students at two non-residential community colleges. Using an outcomes…

Drawing from reports on the future of community colleges, summarizes trends in enrollments, curriculum, student achievement, institutional research, and accountability for educational outcomes. (DMM)

Students in four history classes were administered the Reading Progress Scale, form 5C (1975), to determine if scores would identify students who would have difficulty with coursework. Using multiple regression analysis, the scale accounted for only 8% of grade variance. While the complete sample chi square was significant, individual classes…

In 1976-77, Los Angeles City College (LACC) received the annual reports from 14 of the 19 campuses of the California State University and College System on the performance of LACC transfers. A synthesis of these reports produced the following highlights: (1) 856 transfers were reported; (2) the Los Angeles (65%), Northridge (17%), Long Beach (7%),…